No Tony? Not even when he says, my advice is, if people are dissing you at your workplace get out as fast as you can because there is a place for you somewhere else, and they might even give you an office and let you come in after 10am and not even blink. Sounds pretty sexy to me.

Cool to see Dave is going to CES. This has become an annual pilgrimage for me  covering the event for Linux Journal. 2008 is no exception. I’ll be there for the whole thing. (Though I’ll skip the always crowded and equally pointless Bill Gates keynote.)

CES stands for Consumer Electronics Show, although it’s really about Producer Electronics. At some point the abundance of individual and small producers will outweigh the big name brand ones, and a flip will happen in the marketplace. I think that will come when the customers are no longer just consumers, but active participants in the market’s conversation about product development. There are already moves in that direction. Expect many more.

David Isenberg has announced the next F2C: Freedom to Connect, which will happen on March 31 and April 1 of next year, in Washington, DC. The theme is “The NetHeads come to Washington”. The new term “NetHeads” is counterposed to the old term “BellHeads”, which referred to folks whose world view was framed by the old Bell System, which was the U.S. telephone monopoly until 1984. The successors to that system broadly include the telcos and cablecos through which nearly all U.S. customers connect to the Net.

F2C is for what David calls “the creators of the future of the Internet”, and will be “a meeting of people engaged with Internet connectivity and all that it enables, including vendors, customers, regulators, legislators, analysts, financiers, citizens and co-creators”. The theme is “how universal connectivity and the plunging capital requirements of information production are changing our fundamental economic and social assumptions”.

F2C one of my favorite events. I’ll be going. If you care about the future of the Net, and how it is regulated (and de-regulated) in the U.S., I highly recommend it.